Winners of our sweepstakes are always announced in our BELLAONLINE SWEEPSTAKE NEWSLETTERS. Winners are announced at least a month after the end of each sweepstakes, to give us time to properly tally up all votes and draw a winner. This website is run out of our homes and going through the postcard deluge takes some time!

Winners Online Check-In Form -
http://www.bellaonline.com/misc/sweeps/winners/

JANUARY 1 2008

Happy New Year, everyone!

As you know from my BellaOnline update messages, this past year was exceedingly challenging for our BellaOnline mail server! Our mail system was crashing regularly through the first half of the year, to the point that we did a complete rebuild of the server. Then we had to create an entirely new server and start again from scratch. It's taken us several months to get everything running smoothly on this new server. Even now, we have several large ISPs that are still not taking in mail smoothly from us, because they haven't yet realized that our new server is a "trusted" one that is sending mail from BellaOnline. Our mail is being regularly blocked by them, and I am dealing with their bureaucracy to get things resolved.

What this has meant for our sweepstakes announcements is that we kept holding off on sending out news, because over 50% of the recipients wouldn't have gotten our message. It seemed very unfair to have winners who didn't know they had won!

We are primarily a charity driven, editor-run organization and wish to run things as fairly as humanly possible. We have no corporation sponsoring us, and we run this site from our homes. It sometimes takes us a while to get technical issues like this resolved fully.

We still have a few issues with ISPs, but at this point I want to plow ahead and start announcing winners. What I will do is also list all 2007 winners - for the entire year - on the BellaOnline website as well. That way, hopefully, any winners who do NOT get our messages can still check the website and find out they have won. If you have friends who enter our sweepstakes, please let them know about this list, if they don't get this message for some reason.

Please watch for the winners lists to start being released in the coming days. If you do not get one of the mailings - for example you get July but not August - please check the online site. It will definitely have the names of every single winner set I mail out.

My aim is to have us completely caught up within a few weeks. This will give me time to coordinate with winners and sponsors, hand prune the many bouncebacks we'll get from expired email addresses, and deal with the many ISPs who will try to block us as spammers.

I appreciate greatly your patience and understanding as we've dealt with these issues, and I look forward to a smooth, fun sweepstakes season for 2008!

Lisa Shea
owner, BellaOnline.com

Last update: January 15 2008
DECEMBER 2006 and JANUARY 2007 WINNERS
FEBRUARY 2007 AND MARCH 2007 WINNERS
APRIL 2007 AND MAY 2007 WINNERS

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